I'm not sure that dairies are subsidized nearly as heavily, but probably most all crops (of which I guess sugar is one) have some percentage of their cost subsidized by the government, thus their "true" cost is higher.

Still, do the math. The average American drives maybe 12,000 miles a year and has a car/truck/SUV that gets maybe 18 miles per gallon. That's 667 gallons a year. Now if we figure $14/gallon in 1998 dollars is more like $18/gallon due to inflation and the increased cost of oil, that means every American is spending about $12,000 a year on gasoline.

Now even if we only count 150 million Americans as driving and ignore all airline, bus, train travel, freight, ships, and so on, that works out to 1.8 TRILLION dollars. That's like more than the entire amount of money the federal government collects in taxes in a year. The study is obviously flawed because if you included trucking, shipping, and rail transport, it would imply that the entire USA GDP went towards fuel costs.